Bug Description

I installed updates from oneiric-proposed today. linux-image-3.0.0-18-generic (version 3.0.0-18.31) was among those updates. After rebooting I noticed that I can no longer launch chromium-browser: it segfaults on startup. I attempted to use 'ubuntu-bug chromium-browser' and discovered that apport-gtk also segfaults pretty early on startup.

Rebooting into an older kernel (3.0.0-17 from linux-image-3.0.0-17-generic version 3.0.0-17.30) makes both segfaults go away.

From Google Chrome's perspective, we are seeing a big spike in crashes, and many of the crashes don't make much sense. It is only happening on 32-bit Ubuntu 11.10. Everyone with the crash seems to be running 3.0.0.-18.31. Both Intel and AMD CPUs are affected. Based on a random sampple, on the Intel side, I see crashes from core2s and atom CPUs.

The patch provided by Brad Figg ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/972821/comments/10 ) resolves the problem. Please push this to upgrade as soon as possible. Browsers have become THE MOST used software in Operating system and unusable browser is equivalent to unusable operating system. Please push this otherwise it's giving a bad name to Ubuntu.

Those new kernels broke my Open Sound System (OSSv4 4.2-2006) installation and VirtualBox. I had to make a chroot environment to build working modules. I'm writing those because both 3.0.0-18 and 3.0.0-19 are responsible for building bad kernel modules.